Kruitzner

Kruitzner (1801) is a grand tale of secrets and paranoia set during the end and aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War. The narration follows the arrival of a mysterious stranger who arrives in declining health at a remote village with his wife and child. Soon we learn him to be a disgraced count living in exile from his shameful past and his Bohemian birthright. The dread builds as the narrative shifts from Gothic mystery through cloak-and-dagger tale, gradually revealing the theme of the tragic incomprehension of fathers and sons. Harriet Lee’s style is remarkable throughout, tortuous and arch, and it is perhaps noteworthy that her novel was revered by De Quincey and Lord Byron (Byron even adapted it into a play).

This new edition of Kruitzner marks the first republication of the work since the nineteenth century.

Harriet Lee (1757–Aug. 1, 1851) was an English novelist, playwright, and educator. Her mother, Margaret Lee, was an actress, and her father, John Lee, was an actor and manager of the Edinburgh Theatre during the 1760s. In December 1780, Harriet and her sisters Charlotte, Sophia, and Ann opened a seminary in Bath for the education of girls. The seminary remained open throughout the 1780s and 1790s. Harriet Lee’s literary works include the epistolary novel The Errors of Innocence (1786), the stage comedy The New Peerage (1787), the novel Clara Lennox (1797), the collection Canterbury Tales (co-authored with her elder sister, the dramatist and translator Sophia Lee, and published in five volumes, 1797–1805), and a stage adaptation of her tale Kruitzner, entitled The Three Strangers (1825).